Why is the Euro Symbol (€) not appearing properly after exporting the results into a CSV?

[SwatiApte]

Hi,

I have an "Amount" Column in a Statistical Table on a Dashboard. The values in this field have a Euro symbol added before the actual Amount, For eg. €4,000, €25,000 etc. It appears fine on the Dashboard, but on exporting it in a CSV, I found that the € symbol appears as "€". The Amount column when extracted into a CSV, and opened using MS Excel, gives results like:

€4,000
€25,000

Please note that opening the CSV File in Notepad, shows the € as expected. I have tried using the Codes like "€" And "€" as well, but none of them worked.

Could you please let me know of any workaround to get the Euro symbol properly when opening the exported CSV using MS Excel.

Thanks and regards,
Swati

[grijhwani]

It's not a feature of the CSV standard, or of the file generation. CSV is not a complex data format, and the Euro symbol is not a simple character. CSV was designed for the era of pure ASCII (pre-dating even the extended code-page sets of the IBM PCs in the '80s), and only defines a mechanism for delimiting data. It has no concept of metadata, which would allow you to embed an encoding. As far as basic CSV encoding is concerned, the two-byte extended Euro symbol is just two bytes of data.

Unfortunately, your problem is a feature of the target application not understanding (or being configured for) the correct extended character set. The very fact that your notepad (which is part of the base installation) is recognising the symbol demonstrates it is both present and correctly encoded. Your only valid solution is to ensure that the recipient applications are correctly configured in such a way that they are pre-disposed to recognise the correct language-encoding as the default (presumably ISO 8859-15).

[tom_frotscher]

Hi,

maybe this is an encoding problem. Have you tried the import option of excel? In Excel go to Data -> From Text and chose your CSV FIle. There you can chose from several encodings.

Greetings

Tom

[SwatiApte]

Thanks for the reply Tom 🙂

However, these are workarounds, and might not be convenient for the end Users of the Application. Is there a way of providing the encoding from the code itself?